Van Gogh

A couple of years ago, an artist in my community who has a deep knowledge of Van Gogh’s work and writing designed a community exhibition. He selected many quotes from Van Gogh’s letters, put them in these painted envelopes, and invited people to select one and use it as inspiration for their own art piece.

The Van Gogh quote that I randomly selected was particularly appropriate to my process. I attuned to this statement as well as the ‘spirit’ of Van Gogh, and did a series of Touch Drawings. I then embellished them with color. This is a selection from a larger series.

370- Van Gogh to Emile Bernard, 23 June, 1888

“Yes our own life is a modest one indeed, our life as painters, languishing under the back-breaking yoke of the problems of a calling that is almost too hard to practise on this ungrateful planet, where ‘love of art drives out true love’.

However, since nothing confutes the assumption that lines and forms and colours exist on innumerable other planets and suns as well, we are at liberty to feel fairly serene about the possibilities of painting in a better and different existence, an existence altered by a phenomenon that is perhaps no more ingenious and no more surprising than the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly or of a grub into a maybug.

The existence of a painter-butterfly would be played out on the countless celestial bodies which, after death, should be no more inaccessible to us than the black dots on maps that symbolize towns and villages are in our earthly lives.

Science – scientific reasoning- strikes me as being an instrument that will go a very long way in the future. For look: people used to think that the earth was flat. That was true, and still is today, of, say, Paris to Asnieres. But that does not alter the fact that science demonstrates that the earth as a whole is round, something nobody now disputes. For all that, people still persist in thinking that life is flat and runs from birth to death.”